I used to believe that the ONDCP’s Media Campaign ads didn’t work (in fact, with youth they actually work the ‘wrong’ way). But apparently the New York Times’ Saul Hansell actually was strangely influenced by them.

At least, that’s the only way I can figure out why he lumps marijuana legalization in with UFOs.

Well, the people have spoken. But many of them are not sticking to the topics at hand.
The White House made its first major entree into government by the people last month when it set up an online forum to ask ordinary people for their ideas on how to carry out the president‰s open-government pledge. It got an earful Ö on legalizing marijuana, revealing U.F.O. secrets and verifying Mr. Obama‰s birth certificate to prove he was really born in the United States and thus eligible to be president.
‹Please, as fellow human beings of this great planet Earth, disclose all known information on space/UFO‰s because the world needs to know,Š wrote sprinter5160 on the site, whitehouse.gov/open, which attracted thousands of similar comments on fringe topics.

Saul, marijuana legalization is not fringe. And marijuana doesn’t have anything to do with aliens and UFOs. It’s been here quite naturally for thousands of years.

…the Prince George‰s County Sheriff‰s Department announced that its internal review found that its officers did nothing wrong in the SWAT raid on Berwyn Heights, Maryland Mayor Cheye Calvo‰s home.

As Radley notes, the comments by Sherrif Michael Jackson were particularly outrageous, including:

‹I‰m sorry for the loss of their family pets,Š Jackson said. ‹But this is the unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community. Lost in this whole incident was the criminal element. . . . In the sense that we kept these drugs from reaching our streets, this operation was a success.Š

First of all, the police intercepted the package at the warehouse. At that point, they had already kept the marijuana inside from ‹reaching the streets.Š Everything that happened next was at the discretion of the officers who carried out the investigation and raid well after the marijuana had already been confiscated, which means they and they alone own the results of the raid.
Second, what happened to Calvo isn‰t the ‹unfortunate result of the scourge of drugs in our community,Š it‰s the result of a bumbling, overly aggressive, wholly incompetent police department. And it‰s the result of a drug warrior mentality that believes invading someone‰s home with guns and filling their pets with bullets is an appopriate response to a possible violation of state marijuana laws.

Do these people have any sense of how ridiculous they look when they try to justify their war? Just check out the comments on the Washington Post Article. I haven’t found a single one yet supporting the sheriff. [correction: one, out of 112 comments, supported the sheriff, and it was pretty stupid]